Youth Media Workshop
Empowering economically diverse African-American youth from public schools to make media and social change
Youth Media Workshop Wins Award for Excellence
WILL’s Youth Media Workshop (YMW) received the 2006 Campus Award for Excellence in Public Engagement Team Award from the Office of the Chancellor at the University of Illinois.
The YMW is an after-school program that gives media access, media tools and life skills to African-American students in area public schools by teaching them how to create, broadcast, market and preserve for the public’s use radio and television documentaries made from oral history interviews with local African-American residents. The YMW is currently working with students from Franklin Middle School and Urbana High School.
Franklin teacher, Shameem Rakha, and 8th grade student, Amaris Bailey, wrote letters of support that secured the award for the YMW.
Amaris writes, in an excerpt from her letter:
“The Youth Media Workshop is a great program. I like it because it is a hands-on program. The community is our classroom. We use microphones and digital flash card recorders and Photoshop and editing equipment and cameras to preserve the oral history of local African-American elders. We’re going to turn their interviews into a radio program. We take field trips to places such as the Champaign County Historical Archives, the DuSable Museum in Chicago and local people’s homes. We even helped build a low-power radio station in Urbana, WRFU, and spoke on the air the first night of its broadcast. “
Ms. Rakha writes, in her letter:
“Because of the local history the YMW students are collecting, I have been able to create a new course for my 8th grade honors reading class on the study of the Civil Rights Movement. In this unit, I use source materials from previous Youth Media Workshop documentaries and interviews. I also used downloads from other WILL-created programs such as an interview about Sundown towns with scholar James Loewen. One of my students, who is also a participant in the YMW, researched the history of Sundown towns in Illinois and presented this information at our open house on the Civil Rights Movement. This same student taught a lesson on this topic to her social studies class. Another student did his research on the desegregation of Champaign’s public schools in 1968 using material gathered by students from year two of the YMW. The integration of YMW material into the regular curriculum is a direct result of the roots that are forming from the workshop and starting to take hold in our school.”
For the past three years, YMW co-directors, WILL’s Kimberlie Kranich and Innovative Ed’s Dr. Will Patterson, have worked directly with African-American students in public schools using media production to provide opportunities for them to build mastery of life skills, boost self-esteem, increase social and academic performance and contribute information to the public dialogue.
Also on the team are Leon Dash, U of I journalism professor and Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter; Dave Dickey, WILL-AM 580 reporter; Amy Aidman, U of I assistant research professor; and Walt Harrington, U of I journalism professor.
The YMW is collaboration between WILL AM-FM-TV, the College of Communications at UIUC and Patterson, associate director of the African-American Studies and Research Program at UIUC and founder of Innovative Ed Consulting, Inc., an Urbana-based educational programming, multimedia marketing and action research company.
